NASA’s most sophisticated rover ever sent to Mars has successfully landed on the planet on Thursday, February 18. Robert Zubrin, known as the ‘Mars guru’ and president of the Mars Society, believes a manned mission may not be too far away as civilian companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX are accelerating progress on manned space flight.
NASA’s six-wheeled rover Trail landed safely on Mars on February 18.
It was the most difficult Mars landing to date, with a landing site littered with cliffs, potholes and rocky terrain, any one of which could have led to the failure of the $3 billion mission.
Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society and known as the ‘Mars guru,’ believes a manned mission may not be too far away, perhaps within a decade.
He said, “Once this thing might be about to happen, it’s going to be very, very hot.”
NASA is currently focused on its Artemis Moon program, slated to put the first woman and another man on the moon in 2024, although the plan is increasingly unlikely to come to fruition.
Zubrin believes private companies will be key, especially Elon Musk’s SpaceX and its futuristic-style bullet-shaped starship.
Musk is developing a starship to carry people to Mars, perhaps within a few years, and SpaceX’s second full-scale test flight of the starship earlier this month ended in another crash and burn landing.
Zubrin said, “By 2024, starships will be regularly carrying very large payloads to orbit.”
In the short term, Zubrin believes that the 1.8-kilogram helicopter Solo, which came with Trailblazer, could turn the rules for exploring Mars upside down.
The future could see the next generation of helicopters scouting distant Martian territories for astronauts and even robots.
Zubrin said, “If this succeeds, our ability to explore Mars, either through purely robotic or combined human and robotic exploration, will expand exponentially.”
The one-and-done scenario of NASA’s Mars rovers and landers may not last long.
China, with its own Life-seeking probe, hopes to become the second nation to successfully complete a Mars landing in late spring, its spacecraft having only previously entered orbit around the planet.
China’s secretive, military-related space program has had a string of successes. It brought lunar rocks back to Earth for the first Time since the 1970s last December, and in 2019 China was the first country to land a spacecraft on the nearly unexplored back of the moon.
Most of China’s ties to NASA have been banned by the U.S. Congress, and China is not yet a participant in the International Space Station.
Zubrin believes we are entering a new space race, but that it will “help mitigate the possibility of conflict.
No, I don’t think we’re going to go to Mars with the Chinese in the same spacecraft, like we supply our space station system and China supplies theirs,” he said.
He said, “Maybe we can work together on our respective spacecraft, you know, we get agreements to help each other out if we get into trouble, compete for the honor of who’s going to make the biggest discovery, you know, and that’s the atmosphere we can have.”
The nonprofit Mars Society, whose mission is to raise awareness and promote human exploration of Mars, has no affiliation with either NASA or the U.S. government.
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